Martin Fischer Visualizes Construction’s Future

construction.com May 8, 2001

By Harry Goldstein

Martin Fischer has seen the future of the construction industry and it's 4D.

"I see Martin as the Daddy, someone who took it [4D] to the new level," says Ben Schwegler, executive director of Walt Disney Imagineering Research and Development Inc.

Martin is Martin Fischer, 41, Stanford University associate professor and director of the Center for Integrated Facilities Engineering (CIFE) and one of the world’s leading experts on 4D visualization tools for the AEC industry. The Swiss native is truly a world citizen, widely traveled and widely read, a visionary in an industry more concerned with today’s concrete pour than tomorrow’s technology, a construction professional dedicated to making the process of building structures faster, cheaper and better.

Passing a construction site, Fischer’s first instinct is to see whether it looks like it’s organized efficiently in terms of work flow and material flow. "Sometimes you can see where trades are running into each other or are too far apart, workers bumping into each other and the like."

If only construction professionals could see the future, understand when and where different elements are going to be erected or laid down, know exactly when the concrete slab will be poured to support the crane that will hoist I beams as a tower rises slowly into the sky.

If only they could see what Martin Fischer sees.

Now, thanks to Fischer’s ongoing relationship with Disney Imagineering Research and Development Inc., as well as his relationships with other start-ups in the 4D arena like VirtualSTEP, they can.

It all started with a few words from a family friend during dinner one night at Martin Fischer’s family home in the small Swiss village of Tagerwilen on the verdant shores of Lake Constance.

"He asked me ‘What are you going to do when you grow up?’" Fischer recalls. "Then he said, ‘I wish I had become a bridge engineer. There’s always something to do and you can work anywhere in the world.’" Fischer wanted to study a technical discipline, but didn’t want to become a scientist. His father encouraged him to become a lawyer or a businessman, but when the image of spending his working life clad in a suit, sitting through meetings with other suit-clad men crossed his mind, he rejected the idea. He went through a list of possible occupations and decided there must be something that would allow him to work with a broad cross-section of people: manual laborers, businesspeople, academics and everyone in between. The words of his father’s friend came back to him and when it came time to pick a major in college, he chose civil engineering.

With a father who was an interior designer and a mother who worked for the town as a technical draftsperson, Fischer certainly had the pedigree to excel in his chosen field. As a kid, he followed his father around to job sites to help him do measurements and takeoffs. During his years as a civil engineering student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Ecole Polytechnique Federale, EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in the early 1980s, Fischer worked as a laborer and ironworker on various construction sites in Kanton Thurgau (Switzerland) and in southern Germany. He laid a lot of rebar in his time as an ironworker, and besides paying well, he says that construction was "a good way to see in practice what the challenges were of putting up your designs."

With the money he earned from working, Fischer indulged his passion for travel. Endlessly curious about other cultures, the aspiring civil engineer hopscotched around Europe, visiting Greece and Italy and spending time in Morocco and Senegal before journeying to South America, where he traveled extensively through Chile, Argentina, Peru and Bolivia.

Besides sojourns to distant lands, Fischer parted the nearby Iron Curtain on quite a few occasions to visit his grandmother and cousins in then East Germany during the 1980s. "My [future] wife went once with me to East Germany. She would have never believed me had I described it. When you drove up to the border it was really like the WWII movies you see with the Germans walking around in long leather coats, lights shining through the fog and barking dogs." Driving over eerily empty highways and through various check points to his grandmother’s house, Fischer wondered how people could impose such a bleak, restrictive existence on other people. "It was like driving into a prison," says Fischer, who was buoyed by the perseverance of the human spirit even in the most dire of circumstances. "It was an eye opener in the sense that while people were struggling, they still found ways to be happy as humans…but they had to do it a little differently. It was good to see."

Fischer met his wife Mary while out dancing in San Francisco six months after he moved to the U.S. in 1986. They married in 1992 and have one child, Brandon, now almost five. Moving to the U.S. fulfilled a personal fantasy of Fischer’s to have gone to school or to have worked on every continent. In northern California, Fischer found himself doing both. He worked part time as a project engineer for VSL Corp., a post-tensioning company in Campbell, Calif., while earning a master’s at Stanford University in industrial engineering.

Even with a master’s degree in the making, Fischer’s future was still unclear. Around the time that Fischer was considering the next step, Stanford created the Center for Integrated Facilities Engineering (CIFE) and the opportunity to pursue a doctorate presented itself. Raymond Levitt, a Stanford professor and founder of Vité Corp., Mountain View, Calif., a company that provides software and consulting services to help businesses plan strategic projects, convinced Fischer that he could combine his interests in computer science and civil engineering while earning a doctorate. Fischer also wanted to be affiliated with an institution like CIFE that allowed him to create and maintain industry contacts. After earning his PhD in 1991, Fischer took a job teaching at Stanford. "I didn’t see the same ties to industry and computer science anywhere besides Stanford and I wanted to teach at a place where the infrastructure was in place so I could build on that," he says.

Fischer’s ability to move seamlessly between the worlds of academe and business was a talent he learned in the U.S. "In Switzerland, you talk around the bush and you think people will know what you’re trying to say. When I came here, I came on Rotary Foundation scholarship, and there were a few sponsors here who took care of me, big successful businessmen in Silicon Valley," Fischer recalls. "They would ask me, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ and it eventually dawned on me to tell them how they could really help me. I learned that you should speak up and come to the point right away." If he chose, Fischer could speak up in a variety of languages: he spent many years studying ancient Greek and Latin, and is fluent in German, French, Spanish and of course, English.

Those are skills that his students, like doctoral candidate John Haymaker, appreciate. "One of his strengths is a great ability to condense what you’re trying to say into a few sentences," says Haymaker. "He’s excellent at helping you to write your ideas. And he has a great understanding of the entire supply chain of the construction industry and helps you see where your research fits into that." Fischer’s desire to link research with industry and to emphasize the practical benefits of applied research filters down to students and from his students back to industry. "He demands that as a graduate student you find research relevant to industry. I’ve become a believer in it," says Haymaker. "You can sit in the Ivory Tower and philosophize all you want, but you can get at some good hard problems seeing what the industry is struggling with."

One of those problems has been how to help all the stakeholders in the construction process visualize the schedule in order to proactively solve conflicts before they arise. Many of Fischer’s graduate students have worked with him on developing a prototype 4D simulation tool that links construction schedules with 3D models. These students have deployed the software on several 4D projects over the years: from Eric Collier and the San Mateo County Medical Center in 1994 to John Haymaker, who constructed the 4D model for the Walt Disney Concert Hall currently under construction to Kathleen Liston who, in partnership with Walt Disney Imagineering, is assessing the efficacy of the 4D tool prototyped by Fischer’s group and Imagineering R&D.

"I think they appreciate the practical focus I try to bring into the classroom, while [emphasizing] theory and principals," Fischer says of his relationship with his students. "They enjoy the engagement and most of the time I have fun teaching….You can’t get students engaged in a class if you’re not engaged and having fun--they can tell if you’re not into it." Apparently Fischer’s students have enjoyed being taught by Fischer as much as he’s enjoyed teaching them. In 1999, Fischer was recognized for his pedagogical prowess with the Eugene L. Grant Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Fischer is on sabbatical this year, which means the daddy of 4D gets to spend more time being the daddy of young Brandon. Most days Fischer helps get his son ready for school, makes him breakfast and packs his lunch. Then it’s off to school, Brandon hitched to a trailer on Fischer’s bicycle. The routine was broken a few weeks ago, while vacationing in Hawaii. The Fischers spent a day at the beach and topped it off by visiting a construction site. On display: every kind of construction equipment boys of all ages go gaga over, and Brandon was excited to see it all.

"It was a perfect day," Fischer said, "spending time on the beach, then seeing a construction site."

Photo by Harry Goldstein

© 2001 The McGraw-Hill Companies - All Rights Reserved